Awards

We’re not going to be posting much here while the site is still not behaving properly, but we do have to keep up with the news. Particularly at this time of the year when there is a lot of award news coming out. First up, the BSFA Awards. The winners will be announced at the […]

The 1955 Worldcon in Cleveland revived the idea of an award ceremony from two years before. But they did rather change the awards. In 1953, there had been awards for Best Novel, Professional Magazine, Cover Artist, Interior Illustrator, Excellence in Fact Articles, New Author or Artist and No 1 Fan Personality. When the Hugo Awards […]

Here we are, barely into the new year, and already the award season has begun. The shortlist has been announced for the Philip K. Dick Award for the best novel appearing as a paperback original in the USA. This year, seven books have been shortlisted. They are: The Book of […]

Back in the early 1950s, when the Hugo Awards were born, Worldcon organizers had much more liberty to choose what was and was not included in their programme. So after the 1953 Worldcon decided to introduce the awards, the following year’s convention chose not to repeat the idea. It wasn’t until the 1955 Worldcon that […]

The winners of the first Nommo Awards for Speculative Fiction by Africans have been announced at the Ake Arts and Book Festival in Abeokuta, Nigeria. Best Novel Rosewater by Tade Thompson (and it has just been announced that this is the first volume in a trilogy, which will be published by Orbit next year). Best Novella […]

The organizers of the 1953 Worldcon, known as PhilCon II, were looking for a centrepiece event for their convention. They decided on an award ceremony. The awards would be known as the Science Fiction Achievement Awards, and would be voted on by members of the convention. At the time there was no plan to continue […]

When we were putting together our historical list of the best sf (1950s here) I noticed how rarely the book we chose as the best of the year was one of that year’s award winners. And when we compiled our own lists of the best books of 2015 and 2016, the number one book on each […]

Each year, we take a look at which novels have been identified as the best of the year according to the various voters and jurors for the different sf awards. So, which of 2016’s novels stood out? Well, the first thing you notice is that no novel has won more than one award. The year’s […]

Two things jump out at you when you look at this year’s Hugo results. First: Practically all the winners were women. All the individual winners were women, and the group winners (Marjorie Liu & Sana Takeda for Best Graphic Story; Lynne M. Thomas, Michael Damien Thomas, Michi Trota, Julia Rios, Erika Ensign & Steven Schapansky […]

And the winners are … Best Novel The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin Best Series The Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold Best Novella Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire Best Novelette “The Tomato Thief” by Ursula Vernon Best Short Story “Seasons of Glass and Iron” by Amal El-Mohtar Best […]

Reports of a strange, new habitable planet have reached the Twenty Planets of human civilization. When a team of scientists is assembled to investigate this world, exoethnologist Sara Callicot is recruited to keep an eye on an unstable crewmate.